1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cereal powder production plate.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, for producing cereal powder by processing rice, wheat, corn, beans and so forth, cereal materials are initially washed and then processed through measuring, roasting and crushing steps to obtain the powder of the cereal. Then, the cereal powder is taken out as a product. However, these process steps are conventionally established as independent processes.
In the typical process in production of the cereal powder, a washing and measuring process is performed initially. The weight of the cereal material is measured, at first on a platform scale. Thereafter, the measured cereal is placed in a container of stainless steel or so forth for washing and is dipped into water. Then, the cereal is transported to the next step for the roasting process. The operations set forth above, i.e. placing of the cereal material on the platform scale, dipping of the container for washing the cereal material into water, and transporting to the next roasting process station, are generally performed manually except for a part of the transporting step, in which a transporting machine is employed.
Also, in a process of separation and screening of the roasted cereals, carbonized cereal (burnt cereal) produced during the roasting process must be removed by manual operation with visual observation.
Furthermore, in the process for crushing the roasted cereal to form the cereal powder, it is typical to mechanically crush the cereal by means of a crushing machine, such as a mill or so forth, and to drop the resultant powder into a collecting container. In such case, frictionally generated heat during the process of crushing the cereal increases the temperature of the cereal powder to be higher than that before processing by an extent of over 30.degree. C., thereby potentially causing variation of nutritive substances contained in the cereals. Therefore, as a preparatory process for the crushing process, the cereals passed through the roasting process and the separating and screening process are preliminarily cooled in a cooling facility.
In the prior art arrangement set forth above, various problems are encountered. For instance, in the process of washing and measuring of the cereal material, the operation of loading and unloading the cereal material on and off the platform scale and the operation of feeding the cereal material into and out of the washing container are quite labor intensive. Therefore, a difficulty is encountered in assigning a sufficient number of workers for such operations. This inherently causes rising labor costs and reduced cost-performance. Also, in order to avoid injuring or dampening of the cereal and removal of important nutritive substances during washing, substantial qualification and training of workers performing the washing operation becomes necessary. It is further required to skim out supernatant fluid only to remove washed out foreign matter during the washing process. In addition, the respective steps of measuring, transporting, washing and transporting are performed in a batch manner without unitary control, and thus it is difficult to improve overall efficiency.
Concerning the process of separation and screening of the roasted cereal, it is quite difficult to avoid overlooking of the burnt cereal by visual observation. Furthermore, this screening operation is quite cumbersome and labor intensive.
On the other hand, in the step of crushing the cereal requires a large scale cooling facility for preliminary cooling of the cereal. In addition, such preliminary cooling takes a relatively long period of time, thereby further degrading efficiency and productivity. Furthermore, during the crushing process a part of the crushed cereal powder tends to adhere or deposit on interior surfaces of the crushing machine or flow out upon discharge from the crushing machine. This can clearly lower the production yield. Accumulation of residual cereal powder within the crushing machine inherently causes the necessity of regular or periodic maintenance of the machine.
Additionally, between the process steps of washing, measuring, separating, screening and crushing, there is the necessity for transporting the cereal from one process station to the next. This further requires cumbersome loading operations associated with such transporting, thereby further lowering efficiency of the overall processes.